Edscapades

There is a saying, “familiarity breeds contempt”. As a result, sometimes in life we don’t expect consequences when we should. Here are a few examples I learned from.

Maislin Trucking

When I was young, we had a bus stop at the edge of our neighborhood on the corner of a busy major road. A short way down that road was a trucking company called Maislin Trucking. Every day while waiting for the bus, a few 18-wheeler tractor trailer trucks from Maislin would pass us by.

We were bored waiting for the bus. One day, one of us — not sure who, could have been me — picked up a small pebble, and as one of the trucks passed by, tossed it at the metal trailer.  It made a small plink sound and bounced off.  Several other kids noticed, and the idea spread quickly.  Over the next few days more and more of us picked up small stones and bounced them off the trailers of Maislin trucks as they came by.

As we continued throwing rocks and no truck ever stopped, we began to lose any fear of getting into trouble, so the rocks got bigger and bigger.  The entire bus stop got into the fun.  One person would take a turn as lookout and yell “MAISLIN!” when one of their trucks was sighted.  As the truck passed, all of us hurled chunky stones — sometimes as large as our fist — making many loud boom noises and probably causing some dents.

Finally one day, as we stood at the ready with large rocks in our hands, one of the trucks began to slow down. We all looked at each other with panic as it stopped right in front of our bus stop.  At the same time, we all put our hands with the rock behind our back, dropped it, and stepped to the left.  It was so automatic that an observer might have thought we were practicing a military maneuver.

The truck driver sprang out of the truck and stormed up to us angrily.  “You little [expletives]! Throwing rocks at our trucks!  One of you broke my windshield.  You’re all paying for this!” He pointed to his windshield, which did indeed have a large crack across it.

As he stood there yelling at us, we all knew that we were not the ones who had broken his windshield, but we also knew he might be able to make a fairly good case blaming us.  The trucker finished with, “ONE MORE ROCK from any of you, and you’ve all had it!”  He got back into his truck and drove away.

We stood there in shock for a while.  As we boarded the bus, we were silent and thoughtful.  I realized the truth: because no one had ever said anything, we formed the false impression that no matter how outrageous our behavior got, it was not going to be noticed and there would be no consequences.

The reality was that it was being noticed, and once the consequences came, they were far more significant than if we had been told to cut it out when we were still tossing pebbles instead of using large rocks hurled as if we were competing at Olympic discus. Although we never heard about the cracked windshield again, I was upset with myself when I realized the enormity of what we were doing and how foolish it was not to expect to get into trouble for it.

Parking on Linskey Way

In the late 1980s I was working as a contractor for Lotus Development Corporation, the markers of the first spreadsheet “1-2-3”, when I saw the unexpected consequences pattern repeat itself.

The street next to the building, Linskey Way, was in Cambridge. Parking there was restricted: no parking from 7:00 AM to 9:00 AM, TOW ZONE.  The city was using this rule to keep workers from parking on the street all day.  If one arrived at 8:45, one might find a parking spot, park there, and sit in the car until 8:55 when it felt safe to leave the car.

People looking for a spot noticed others waiting in their car to avoid getting towed and decided to copy the trick. When enough people did it, all the spots were used up at 8:40, then 8:30, then even earlier than that.  People did not want to sit in their car for too long, and since no one had ever seen a tow truck people started parking there whenever they arrived and immediately exiting their car to head to work.

Remembering past incidents with unexpected consequences, I decided leaving my car that early was too risky for me and started parking elsewhere. Finally, one day around 8 AM, a fleet of high-speed magnetically attaching tow trucks arrived and moved everyone parked on that street to a nearby facility.  As we watched from a window, they towed at least 100 cars within a half hour. Everyone who got towed had to pay at least $100 to get their car back, and this was back in the 1980s so it was a lot of money.

The next day, people continued to park there, but no earlier than 8:45 and they stayed in their cars until close to 9:00. Surprisingly, the cycle of it getting earlier and earlier started again, perhaps with people who had never been towed. Within a few weeks the fleet of tow trucks was back making another pile of money.

Office Time

I once had two coworkers who decided to follow an unofficial policy of “working at home”. The company had ended any remote work after COVID, so it was definitely not allowed, and it seemed like they were just taking days off without declaring them rather than actually doing any work when not in the office.

As time went on and they were not reprimanded, they got more and more brazen. They “worked at home” more frequently, and even worse, they became lax about their arrival time and come in late whenever they felt like it. It was especially risky because the company did have an official start time of 8:00 AM, they had to use access badges to swipe in, and all swipes were saved in a corporate database.

After several months, someone finally noticed. The company ordered a full investigation of everyone’s time. The badge scan database was correlated with the time off database, and a full report was produced showing every tardy and every unauthorized day off.

Panic ensued and sure enough, the company was quite unhappy with the report. Although the tardy twosome were the worst offenders, particularly with taking days off, a lot of others got caught in the net for enough relatively small tardies. I expected some people to be fired, but HR apparently told management that the time off policies were too vague and had to be corrected before strict enforcement. All the time off policies were revised and a stern memo went out to everyone.  There were two key hostile changes:

• Arriving at 8:00:00 or later was now considered officially tardy, and if employees were tardy enough times they could be disciplined up to and including termination.
• There was no “working at home” unless explicitly authorized by management.

The unfortunate thing this time was that everyone was punished when only two people had really gone overboard with their behavior.  Some of us had to start leaving for work 15 minutes earlier to make sure we were always there before 8:00:00 AM because now, an occasional 5 minutes late mattered.

Never assume that a pattern of no consequences for your actions will continue indefinitely. If you do, you might find that when they come, they come suddenly and devastatingly hard.

You got a long way to go, boy!

— Joshua

One day, as a teenager, I was riding my bicycle when I rode by Joshua, a younger boy from my neighborhood. Mounting his bike, he aggressively challenged me to a race from a nearby stop sign to a phone pole at the end of the block. He finished the challenge by brashly claiming that there was no way I could beat him.

Given our relative sizes, I knew he couldn’t possibly keep up with me, so I laughed out loud as I accepted the challenge. I gave him a small head start and then quickly passed him. As I arrived at the pole, I turned around to gloat — but he had turned his bike around and was heading in the opposite direction. “You got a long way to go, boy!” he yelled back at me, as if the race had been from the pole to the stop sign, rather than the other way around.

Possibly thinking there had been some mistake, I turned and pedaled hard, passing him again before he reached the stop sign. Once again, as I reached it he had turned his bike around and was moving in the original direction — back towards the pole. “You got a long way to go, boy!” he yelled again, as if he were winning the race.

We went back and forth several times; each time I passed him before he reached either end, and each time he simply turned around and acted as if I had lagged behind him. I tried yelling back at him that he was cheating, and that I’d beaten him several times, but he ignored me and continued to gloat.

Finally, I realized that he would never admit reality: that he had been easily beaten several times. I told him he had lost, but he yelled back that I was the one who had lost. As I rode away, he continued to celebrate his victory and how much better a cyclist he was compared to me, until his voice faded into the distance. There wasn’t any way I could think of to force him to admit the truth, so my only option was to ignore him and leave.

Throughout my lifetime, I’ve seen this scenario repeated more times than I can count. Not just with children, but with plenty of adults as well. When it’s a convenient, desirable outcome, many people are all too willing to remain willfully in delusion. For example, a friend once claimed that smoking “natural tobacco” could not cause her any harm because it didn’t have any chemical additives. When I pointed out many reasons that was not true and pointed to the large body of scientific proof that she was wrong, she replied, “That’s true for you, but not for me.”

Remaining in willful delusion is never a good thing. We should always be examining our attitudes and viewpoints to check for it. If you’re on the receiving end, the important thing is to know when to just walk away. You can discuss facts and logic, but when someone simply refuses to admit the obvious truth the way Joshua did, there’s little point in continuing.

“It’s a trailer thing” is a phrase I use to mean when someone is indignant at an accusation not because they are innocent, but because they don’t believe it to be possible that their accuser knows the truth. The phrase comes from an incident in my youth.

I had a friend Simon* who found a large metal bar in the woods. Late one night he decided to use it as a lever and managed to tip over and damage a camping trailer in the neighborhood that belonged to someone we didn’t particularly like.
* not his real name, of course

The family who owned the trailer almost immediately called Simon’s parents and informed them of what their son had done. He denied it vehemently but was nevertheless blamed and punished. The conversation we had about it went something like this:

“They called my parents immediately! Can you believe that? There’s no way they saw me do it,” Simon said angrily, pacing back and forth.

I looked at Simon, confused. “But…you did do it.”

“But they didn’t see me do it,” Simon shot back, scowling.

This exchange went on with each of us repeating ourselves but were never able to agree. Simon felt that the call to his parents was unjust and unreasonable because he felt that it wasn’t possible that he had been seen.

We often see Simon’s point of view in relationships. Let’s make up a fictitious couple Clarice and John. John is cheating on Clarice with another woman, but is very careful to cover his tracks. Over time, Clarice knows in her gut that something is wrong and strongly suspects the truth. John reacts with actual outrage when she finally asks him if he’s seeing someone else because he doesn’t feel she has adequate evidence for suspicion.

Sometimes we see events that are accidental “trailer things”, too. Let’s make up a fictitious shoplifter named Mary. Mary steals regularly and has taken thousands of dollars of merchandise over hundreds of small thefts. Finally one day when Mary is actually shopping she is arrested and formally charged by the police because store security thinks they see her take something. Mary feels the arrest and charges are extremely unjust and unreasonable since she didn’t steal that day, even though she has previously stolen many times from that same store.

If you find yourself feeling outrage over accusations that are true, or over persecution that is long overdue, you might want to check yourself. Because it’s a trailer thing.

The power of love transcends the power of hate.

Hate is a condition of madness, of darkness, of impurity. Love is clarity; love is light and purity. Hate is dirty; love is clean. Hate is the easy path, paved with a lack of self discipline and giving in to our baser natures: obtaining vengeance at the slightest wrong, acting wantonly without regard to the way it might affect others, selfishly taking what we want for ourselves when others are in need. Love is the hard path, full of difficult trials like forgiveness, suspending judgement, and moving on when we have been wronged.

Maintaining love is like keeping a spotless house: it means a constant vigil against the dust of others’ trespasses against us, and the cobwebs of their malignant acts which slowly accumulate as anchors to keep our hearts from flying to the heights. When others wrong us, when they victimize us, they leave an awful mess to clean up and sometimes even damage to the house that has to be repaired. Great trials can be like a house fire, leaving all kinds of terrible damage. But in the end we must cut away the blackened damage and replace it with freshly painted repairs, so that our house can once again be a place we’d like to live. To do otherwise is to inhabit a state of mind that we never would willingly, and makes defeat at the hands of another more complete and longer lasting.

No one would want to live in a house that was burned, with holes in the walls and a partial roof that let the rain in, that smelled like smoke and had soot, cobwebs, and dirt everywhere. Why then should we be willing to walk around with our soul in such a state? If our homes were in this condition we would repair them without delay. The same urgency should be applied to ourselves: to scrub and cut the damage away, to patch, to repaint, until finally we are in a state that mirrors the fixed up and repaired house. Shining, looking new, making us feel good just to be alive. It is not an easy task, for we cannot manipulate ourselves as easily as we can work with building materials. And yet, it can be done — if it is our true will to become clean again.

People protest when they disapprove of something and want to change it.  Protests can take many forms.  There are simple acts like posting online or putting up signs.  One can protest by participating in a march or rally.  Acts of civil disobedience, or even violence and destruction, are sometimes committed as a form of protest.

When people protest, they want to express themselves to show others how they feel, and what they want changed, to help bring about that desired change.  They also want to connect with others who feel the same way, to share the experience and to reinforce each other in a common goal.

For a desired change to occur, a sufficient consensus must be reached among the people whose cooperation is needed to make that change.  A protest done to change a law would need to convince enough legislators that the change could be voted in successfully.  A protest done to change an undesirable behavior would need to convince whoever was behaving in the undesired way to stop.  Given the need for consensus, protest can be defined as an exercise in persuasion.  All protests are, in essence, a form of communication with the specific goal to bring about a change in awareness and opinions that in turn enables the desired change.

Marketing is a name for the activities done to promote, sell, or distribute something (e.g., a product or service) or someone (e.g., a political candidate).  Marketing includes doing research to find who the target customers are and deciding how to persuade them to accept or purchase something, which is really just a way of saying that the goal of marketing is to bring about a change in awareness and opinions that in turn enables a specific desired change.

Fundamentally, protests are a form of marketing, and for a protest to be effective it must use the same practices as effective marketing.  For example, finding out who needs to be persuaded (the target customers), getting the target customers’ attention, and effectively communicating with and persuading the target customers.

There are difficulties when applying these practices to protesting, and they can prevent a protest from being successful.  Protests often occur when people have become angry, which makes logical and effective thinking a challenge.  When large numbers of people join protests, they are not easy to coordinate or control; protests can even be hijacked by participants who have motivations that don’t align properly with the protest’s cause.

A protest does not target those who already agree with the basis of the protest; it targets those who don’t agree and therefore need to be convinced.  If a protest offends and alienates that target audience, then it is likely to either fail outright, or even worse, to backfire and harm the the cause of the protesters.  There is no universal formula for success or failure in protests, just as their isn’t for selling products and services.

Good marketing efforts involve a brand — the identity and nature of whatever is being marketed.  Brand includes the product or service, and also includes the people who are creating it, selling it, and servicing it.  A brand encompasses every experience that someone might have relating to the product or service and has a tremendous effect on how the product or service is perceived.  It is no different for a protest.  Those participating, their perceived actions, words, and character, shape the brand of the protest’s cause.

Just as with marketing efforts, protests that are well thought out, have good planning and leadership, and create a well perceived brand, are far more likely to cause the desired change.

My first year in college, I lived in a high-rise dormitory with a large common laundry room in the basement. The laundry was busy almost 24 hours a day, with all of the dozens of machines in use. One day, one of the dryers was somehow damaged so that its door wouldn’t stay shut without actively leaning against it. The door would pop open and its sensor would shut the dryer off. No one wanted to have to press up against the dryer for the entire time while using it, so for the most part it was out of service.

Having one less dryer than there were washing machines was a problem. There was now a game of musical chairs to play when wash got done. There ended up being a surprisingly large pool of people competing for a dryer, with occasional aggressive behavior and arguments. Notes were left for Building and Grounds (B&G) to fix the dryer, but day after day nothing happened. I’m sure that someone from B&G showed up, saw that they could run the dryer if they pressed the door closed, and decided that no action needed to be taken. After all, actually fixing a problem is more effort and expense than simply filing a response to a maintenance ticket.

Finally one day I walked into the laundry to find that someone had ripped the dryer door off, leaving jagged metal on both the door and the dryer. The door was sitting on top of the dryer with, “Maybe you’ll fix it now” written on it in large black letters. Two days later, a new dryer had been installed to replace the broken one. The laundry room had returned to normal, as there was once again a dryer for each washer.

Thinking about what had happened, I realized a simple truth. When a problem is just bad enough to still be tolerated, it probably won’t be fixed. Sometimes things have to be made worse in order for them to get better. I have used this idea countless times in the years since, both for myself and as advice for others.

I once knew an engineer who had been assigned the role of running an IT department for a growing startup. When there were only a dozen people to service, his job was manageable. The company had grown to almost 200 employees, he was working hundred hour weeks, and his backlog of overdue tasks was massive. He looked tired, stressed, and ill. One day I told him the story of the dryer door, and said, “You aren’t actually helping the company with this heroic effort. They need to hire people to assist you, and until they do, things won’t run well. You need to start coming in only 40 hours a week.” He looked at me in shock and replied, “But things would fall apart!” I smiled and said, “Yes, they would — just as the dryer did when the door was ripped off.”

He decided I was right and stopped working overtime. Within two weeks, the IT infrastructure had begun to fall apart. The company was forced to recognize that IT was critically understaffed and hired two additional IT employees. Everyone’s lives were better and within a month IT was in better shape than it had ever been.

Sometimes things have to be made worse in order for them to get better. Or, as I like to say, sometimes you have to rip the dryer door off.

I have many stories, anecdotes, and thoughts.  I will post here when I think they might have value to others.